Kerry to Congress: Ignore Israel's Concerns on Iran

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We'd love to be able to stop writing about John Kerry, really we would. But the guy can't stop taking shots at Israel long enough to behave like, you know, an actual ally.

On Wednesday, Kerry and lead Iran negotiator Wendy Sherman appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to dissuade Congress from imposing additional sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

According to senators and aides who spoke to popular Internet news site BuzzFeed, Kerry explicitly told the attending lawmakers to ignore everything they had been told by Israel concerning current negotiations on an Iran nuclear deal.

"Every time anybody would say anything about what would the Israelis say they’d get cut off and Kerry would say, ‘You have to ignore what they’re telling you, stop listening to the Israelis on this,’" revealed one Senate aides.

The damage that Kerry and his boss, President Barack Obama, are doing to US-Israel relations was evident in an Israel Radio poll showing that Israelis no longer trust America to help defend them against Iran, or presumably any other major threat.

Asked if America could be relied upon to safeguard Israel's security in nuclear talks with Iran, a full 55 percent of Israelis replied in the negative. Only 31 percent said the current US administration could be trusted in this regard.

Despite claiming to have a grasp on the situation, Kerry apparently fails to realize the far-reaching implications of this phenomenon, not least of which is the negative impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on which Kerry is spending so much time and diplomatic capital.

A fundamental tenet of the peace process is that Israel's security concerns must be assuaged. Enemies have tried to annihilate the Jewish state too many times for it to be otherwise.

Most of the major concessions Israel has made to date have been justified on the grounds that if anything goes wrong, America will have Israel's back. If Israelis no longer believe that, can Kerry and Obama really expect Jerusalem to continue meeting Arab demands?